Coming off the heels of two straight losses the Hawks responded with a 29-21 victory over American Int’l on Saturday in their homecoming bout.

The Hawks victory on Saturday was highlighted by a great game in all phases on both offense and defense. As the Hawks tallied an impressive 406 yards of total offense while holding American Int’l to 303 yards of total offense which only yielded five yards of rushing on 32 carries.

The game started out much like the game last week as the Hawks only put up three on their first drive and would then allow two touchdowns, one coming off of a turnover, as they quickly faced a 14-3 deficit in the first quarter. However, the Hawks learned from last week and responded with sound football from that point headed by their stellar rushing game. The Hawks rushed for a total of 87 yards in route to their comeback victory. However, an even bigger story to come from this game was the play of senior quarterback Eric Fairweather who had a tough game last week and responded loudly. Fairweather was 32-59 (54%) and threw for a total of 319 yards. The biggest stat from Fairweather came with the value of zero as he had no interceptions thrown, which was a big improvement from last week’s four-interception debacle against Assumption.

In this game, there were a lot of responses to last week’s game against Assumption as the defense only allowed 21 points, seven of those coming in the fourth quarter, as the defense strengthened after a 14 point first quarter and held American Int’l scoreless for the second and third quarter. The scoreless two quarters came with help in the turnover department as senior Nick Giordano picked off American Int’l to lead to a score at the end of the first half.

Overall this game was a complete flip of what was seen last week as the Hawks third down efficiency went up on both sides of the ball. The Hawks converted 10-24 on first downs (42%), which was up from last week’s 8-24 (33%). Further, the defense was able to get off the field on third down as they held American Int’l to just 5-19 (26%) on third down which was down from last week’s 6-14 (43%).

With the victory over American Int’l the Hawks improve to (1-2) on the year with one conference victory and turn their sights to Southern Connecticut St. who also enters at (2-2). The Hawks with a victory could separate themselves from the five other teams who enter week four at (1-2) in the conference. A win over Southern Connecticut St. would give the Hawks a lot of momentum and show the rest of the conference that if they execute in all phases of the game and do not turn the ball over they are a very difficult team to beat.